Vulnerable

I remember us in that moment

through the blurring of our after-heat—

you, twirling strands of golden hair

fanning out across your breast

and me, in the waves against the ceiling,
of a vague and incipient hope.

Turning into me,

you said that you're afraid of water

when you can’t see bottom—of the hidden things

lurking underneath. How you always let
the others jump in first,
to scare away the dark things.

When you asked me about my fears,  

I thought about your story when

sitting behind a barn, you saw your dog

step suddenly around the corner, half its face

hanging from a bloody strand—the work

of an alcoholic father.  

Turning into you, I taught you 

how to say “your eyes are beautiful”,

in Mandarin, suddenly beholden to

the way your body rippled with my touch

like the surface of a shimmering pond

in a long forgotten memory.

How beautiful that pond was,

but how young I felt playing at its edge

dipping a finger in its warmth,

unaware of the currents underneath

and the incomprehensible things

with names I’d never known.

What to tell you about feeling old

about days that turn to years,

about the fear of dissolution,
about the bird of anxiety, perching on the soul

about the bitterness that rises in a man

like gin in a dusty bar glass.

That night we walked the path

from memory to desire, joining at the place

where two horizons meet,

warm in the light

of what we didn’t understand

but wanted to discover.

From the window of a dream,
I saw a man, drowning in an ocean’s black,
having swam too far
from the shore of self-conception,
from the assumptions of the past,
from the premises that, alone,
bear the weight of their conclusions
and weave a life
through a tangled mess
of circumstance.

Then I woke up
from a broken-down dream
and sat up from my bed
as people must do
to avoid dissolution
and peeled off a blanket
and put down a foot
on the cold underneath,
then the other

until I was walking
into the light, shifting
on the floorboards
coming from the window
at the end of the hall
and followed it
as an animal would do
and as I did, as the living
must do, in order
to live, I walked

past the clothes on the floor,
past the thermostat clicking
past the kitchen,
past a counter of dishes
past the coffee maker
past the picture of my grandfather
past my phone charging
past the living room
past my Ikea coffee table
past the books from the library
past my guitar in the corner
past a bottle of meds
past the spider plant dying
past the hallway
past myself in a mirror
past myself in the mirror

then got to the window
and looked past the rooftops
wearing the winter's
early dawn dream-light
and felt the cold wind
rattling the branches
and pulling the steam
and considered

the logic of change
of one thing becoming
another, but holding
the assumption of past
and the premise
that there is in this world
anything concrete

Suddenly, the fear
that the lessons, they come
but they come too late
and laden
with unnecessary loss;
that the wisest among us
have taken, and held
what they can.

Once, in San Miguel de Allende

I remember that night
she came to the courtyard,
emerging from the darkness
like a butterfly from a hedgerow
to float in the lamplight
for an awaited Señor. 

And I remember as I watched her
in her flowing white blouse
and her high platform shoes,
the pulse of my heart in my drunken aloneness—
and my own swish of desire
for another, within.

But how long she fluttered there
anxiously waiting—
as she fussed with her hair
and the purse on her shoulder,
entreating the void with her burnt umber eyes—
I don't know

Only that, there in the desert,
I waited as she waited, wanted
as she wanted; the feel of the breeze
of the paintbrush of Being
blending with warmth the dark shades
between us—

Only drinking deeply,
and in love with the possible.
Only at the knife's edge
of attainment and desire—
here on this canvas,
only now.

Untitled

“Keep your head clear, and know how to suffer like a man.” Santiago (Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea)

Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man
Keep your head clear and know         to suffer like a man
Keep your head          and know  how to suffer      a man
Keep your head clear                          to suffer like a man
Keep  your head         and            how to         like    man
Keep   your                      know  how to suffer          man
                            clear      know how to                 a man 
Keep                   clear                        to suffer          man
                                           know       to suffer          man       
Keep                  clear                                               man
                                                               suffer          man
                                                                                 man

On Freedom

Blind from staring
at the sun of my existence,
I try to trust my gasping footsteps
as they find their concrete place--
and succeed, somehow, at the feat of action,
despite the doubting that remains
and the darkness that they face.

Forever

My soul soaked in alcohol,
I tried to find the flame of you,
to burn me free forever.

Now, on the walk home from the bar,

I try to find my footing through
a slush of feeling, trapped inside

the winter of my heart.
Shouting if I never find you, this
is not my world, but some alien place 

Some dream—a snow storm in the emptiness
containing everything forever—
and me, nothing but a set of footprints,

a snap of ice, an exhalation;
a shadow plodding forward through
a silent, never-ending street.